Suppose you wanted to send someone a message, M, in binary it might look like:
M= {0,1,1,0,1,0,1,0...}
Before you send it you XOR it with some random noise R1 that happens to look like this (You save this noise pattern for usage one more time later)
R1={1,0,1,1,0,0,1,1...}
Giving
M(R1)={1,1,0,1,1,0,0,1,...}
Then you send it to person 2, anyone seeing the message en route will just see noise.
Then person 2 takes the message and generates some random noise and saves it for later that looks like this:
R2= {0,0,1,1,0,1,0,0...}
They XOR the message M(R1) they received with their noise to get:
M(R1,R2)= {1,1,1,0,1,1,0,1,...}
Person 2 sends this back to person 1, anyone who intercepts the message would see something like noise:
Person 1 now uses the noise he saved R1 and !XOR's(the opposite of XOR) it with the message he just received to yield:
M(R2)={1,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,1,...}
Now he sends it back to Person 2, and as usual anyone intercepting just sees random noise:
Person 2 now
!XOR's(the opposite of XOR) the message with his saved noise R2 to get:
M = {0,1,1,0,1,0,1,0}

So you see now person 2 reads the message person 1 sent without it ever being sent as anything that looked other than random noise.
Once the two computers connect this could be done nearly instantaneously.

Friday, June 29, 2012

I've seen some yarn art made by stretching the yarn over nails set up like this:

I think people have assumed when you do something like the above that makes a circle, but you can see it goes outside of a perfect circle, though it is close.

Mathematically, the dark blue curve outside the circle results when you connect the points:
[a, c] and [c, c-a] for some c as a varies from 0 to c (pictured is c=5).

Dr. Rose found the parametric equation for the curve:

I tried to find the y=f(x) but it turned out it was 5 pages long!
The graph of the radius in polar coordinates for this function is:

Which looks a lot like a normal distribution but is too short and wide for what would be the standard deviation. You can see the radius is always greater than 5, so it does indeed lie outside the circle of radius 5.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

I've been mulling this over for the past few days.. if English were written like the Python programming language with a few modifications...

You would have a different class for every noun there is, they would be arranged in a hierarchy, like the class for the noun boy might look like:

class Boy(Human):
self.age = range(0, 18)
self.gender = "male"

Then the human class in turn might look like:

class Human(Mammal):
self.age = range(0, 120)
self.gender=("male", "female", "other")
def walk(..., mode="bipedal")...
The walk function is mostly the same as for a mammal which is in turn the same as a lot of animals, etc... but in humans it is bipedal type of walking.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Friday, June 1, 2012

There is acid in the left beaker (HCL) and a base in the right (NaOH) and a tube connecting the two containers. The tube is filled with the mixing solutions so there is a liquid connection from the left glass to the right beaker. And with the red and black electrodes I'm measuring a voltage of .2V.
I believe the principle is that there is a net positive charge moving from the left glass to the right beaker which pulls electrons through the wire and produces a voltage. The problem is the resistance of the whole circuit is up towards a million ohms so there is not much current flowing at that voltage. I would like to find some acids and bases that conduct electricity much better so there will be more current.
Usually in a battery the principle of it's action is much different, you have two different metals dissolving and plating in acid in both beakers. Actually, to me it is surprising that Google didn't even have results for basic queries like what acid conducts electricity the best which naturally arises from making a battery by this principle. So I think I might be the first one to notice this effect.